Sick of capped DSL service, I decided to create a personal FTP server on a network much faster than my own. Focusing on security and cost efficiency.

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Instructable: http://www.instructables.com/id/FerretPi-Using-Raspberry-Pi-as-a-Secure-FTP-Server/
I've been living in an old apartment building in the beautiful, scenic Independence, Missouri for about a year and a half now. Because of the building's age and the amount of inhabitants, internet speed here is absolutely atrocious. I pay for 3Mb/s ATT DSL service, but no one in the building (regardless of equipment) can get more than 300kb/s at best. To add insult to injury, the ATT DSL services has a data cap of 150GB per month. I think many of you IT pros will agree that it isn't hard to go way beyond 150GB with Steam, and system updates, and .iso downloads, not to mention streaming Netflix and Pandora all the time.

The solution? Create a small, simple, and affordable server with attached storage to download anything I need from a faster network with no data limitations. The server will keep a bulk of it's data on a portable hard drive, which I can remove whenever I want to take home the fruits of my labor. The server will also run various FTP services that will allow me to download anything I might need on the fly.

The solution arrived to me in the form of a Raspberry Pi fitted with a custom Linux OS that will be built from scratch using guidelines from the HLFS project (http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/hlfs/). To my knowledge, this will be one of the first uses of a Raspberry Pi as a hardened and secure FTP server, giving the project the moniker of FerretPi.

Goals of the FerretPi project:
Primary Objectives:
- Run an FTP server on a Raspberry Pi with full functionality
- Set up automation for file and log management
- Apply basic Linux security best practices (such as no root login from SSH, etc)
- Construct a reporting system to notify of system changes via SMS or e-mail